With
well over half a million words in the English language catalogued, and uncounted others besides if one included technical jargon, slang and the bits of
lingua franca we all know and love, why do I always come across the same few? Why do people permit their capacity for descriptive prose to be so limited? How does it follow that the mere presence of a now-popular term can immediately turn me against reading a blog any further? Truly, it stems not from intellectual snobbery - it is overwhelming fatigue. I need something new to read.
For instance: "
ad hominem." Lovely bits of lyric Latin lingo have been littering our language all our lives. Why does this particular term come to light, and with such ferocious frequency, only now? The easy answer would be to of course look at where it is found; in the dung pits that often pass as commentary pages of political blogs. It is not enough to have to wade through the ad hominem, but now we slog through the accusations of same, and while one may call it as they see it, I sometimes wish it might be seen in thesauric terms. (Thesauric; I just made that up. You see? It's easy. Just use a different word.)
Or "straw man" - ever the easy targets, yet never quite at the center of the action, the friends of Dorothy have long borne the brunt of many an assault, most especially her flopsy friend (yes, it is humor, people). Can we at last put a fire to this scarecrow, and call it toast? Fallacious argument is just that, a red-herring, or MacGuffin if you will. Do we really need to drag horse feed into it?
"Ilk." No, not a tall cold glass of wannabe ice cream. This is the latest in a long line of memetic mot-justes which simply will not go away from what I can tell. In the main, I find it employed to disparage the advocates of this or that political personality: I'd call them ditto-heads, but then I'd have to lengthen this list. "She and her ilk...." Ilk. It is apt, indubitably, but still an ugly word. And a tired one to boot. Give it the boot (and ditto for "ditto-head").
Am I nuts? Or just a latte-sipping, Volvo-driving, sushi-eating, intellectual phony? Sentence fragments welcome.